Some universities have pushed back against Trump administration pressures to reshape curriculum and programs. Others have given in to threats of withholding billions in research funds. Yale University has chosen a third way: issuing a report acknowledging that studies show a huge faculty tilt to the left and pledging “a self-study regarding diversity of perspectives in the curriculum.”
The ten professors who produced the “Report of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education” began by acknowledging a problem: A decade ago, most Americans expressed confidence in higher education, but 70 percent of people in 2025 said higher ed is heading in the wrong direction. The committee said Yale itself has a problem with academic freedom: “In a 2025 survey by the university, nearly a third of undergraduate respondents disagreed with the statement that ‘I feel free to express my political beliefs on campus.’”
Conservative students were more likely to express discomfort, and the committee reported one estimate that may explain why: “Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 36 to 1 across the Faculty of Arts Sciences, the Law School, and the School of Management.” Nationwide among faculty, registered Democrats apparently outnumber registered Republicans 10 to 1.
The report’s recommendation of departmental self-study is supposed to begin this fall. That’s nice, but I’m skeptical. I was a student at Yale and still have some contact. It has long been a self-satisfied place, and self-study by the self-satisfied rarely leads to change.
The report also examined other concerns, such as grading practices:
Over the past several decades, grading across many institutions has steadily lost its meaning. In 1963, ten percent of grades in Yale College were an A or A-. In 2022–23, that number was seventy-nine percent. Today, the median student at Yale receives an A. Peer institutions are similar.
Why? Faculty face pressures when promotion “depends largely on student enrollments and evaluations. … No individual faculty member wants to be the strict grader.”
So true. For 25 years, I was a professor at The University of Texas at Austin, where grade inflation also makes student averages as large as longhorns. I admire this line in the Yale report: “Nearly everyone inflates and no one can stop.” That could be a reference to academic egos.
The problem is what to do about it. The Trump administration has tried to cut some big university budgets run wild. My academic experience leads me to give that initiative one cheer, but I do not trust the federal government to know what is best in education. Nor do I trust faculties that are often one-dimensional. As Christians, we should wish plagues on no one, but if we were to make an exception some political and university houses would qualify.
Donors particularly should beware. My own sense is that evangelicals who make undesignated contributions to many major universities are making a mistake. Let big football programs—and prestigious but ideologized departments—rise or fall on their own. Instead, support the privately funded Christian study centers that now exist at or adjacent to 37 major universities.
The Rivendell Institute at Yale is one of those centers. I know well and esteem Hill House, two blocks off the campus of UT Austin. Other centers at Cornell and Duke, Michigan and Minnesota, Virginia and Wisconsin, and other key institutions are also growing.
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The study centers are hubs of Christian community, hospitality, and learning. They serve as havens and launching pads by offering Bible studies, lectures, reading or film discussion groups, and fellowship meals.
Many such groups are members of the Consortium of Christian Study Centers, which promotes “integrated and transformational knowledge and callings” among Christians who study and work at major universities. Formed in 2008, the consortium had 19 member centers in 2015 and has 37 now, with others at Rice and elsewhere on the way
Christian colleges are crucial. But so is this Christian presence at influential secular universities. Consortium participants can “take up the historic mission of the college as an educational institution pursuing the moral and intellectual formation of persons.” They can reject arrogance from academia and the government alike.
Marvin Olasky is editor in chief of Christianity Today.
